May 25 – The Watered-Down NSA Surveillance Reform Bill; A Middle East Without U.S. Leadership; Shutting Down Legal Abortion Clinics in the South

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the USA Freedom Act, a watered-down NSA surveillance reform bill that passed the House last Thursday by 303 to 121 votes. Shahid Buttar, the executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee and the People’s Campaign for the Constitution joins us to discuss the gutting of the first legislation aimed at curbing the abuses that Edward Snowden revealed through last-minute language inserted by intelligence community loyalists. We also look into the disappointment expressed by Senator Leahy whose much tougher Senate bill will be considered next month.

Part 2

Then we speak with Graham Fuller, the former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA and the author of a new book “Turkey and the Arab Spring: Leadership in the Middle East”. He joins us to discuss the growing irrelevance of U.S. policies and attitudes in the region that are tied to reactionary regimes like Saudi Arabia while Turkey’s Muslim model of dynamic and effective democratic governance is all-but ignored in a region where the Arab world is adrift and where conventional U.S-centric analysis does not reflect the Middle East’s own history and culture. `

Part 3

Then finally Francis Kissling, the former president of Catholics for Choice, who is a consultant to the Western Hemisphere Region of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, joins us to discuss restrictive new anti-abortion laws passed last week in Louisiana that add to Alabama’s, Mississippi’s and Texas’s efforts to outlaw abortion by forcing abortion clinics out of business through the imposition of onerous medical burdens on their clinics. We discuss the growing red and blue state divide in America and the prospect of millions of women taking busses north for procedures that are legal in the nation but unattainable in the South.